Technological Immersions: Visuality, Art, and Ocean Science

Visuality exists as a precarious entity in underwater environments: without artificial lighting, the actual colors of arguably the most colorful fauna on earth – coral reefs – aren't visible to the human eye. In the deep sea, a habitat defined by daylight's absence, bioluminescence has developed in animals not to gain visibility, but rather to become invisible to other predators. Concurrently, organisms inhabiting these abysses can be equipped with skin producing spectacularly iridescent effects – but only if light hits the surface of their bodies. This all-but-paradoxical sensorial disposition of oceanic surroundings constitutes a compelling breeding ground for a critical examination of the submerged visual paradigm. Accounting for the 20^th century’s technological advances which expanded human sensorial capacities under the water’s surface, this panel seeks to explore oceanic opticality. Taking the methodological approach of ‘conceptual displacement’, described by Melody Jue in Wild Blue Media – which aims to utilize the subversive potential of deep-sea surroundings as a catalyst for the questioning of long-established paradigms – asking: what does ‘visuality’ mean in a place defined by its very lightlessness? How can the hegemony of the visual in epistemic processes be challenged? How can the oceanic habitat, a fundamentally unseeable place, be made visually available? Where do technologies play a role in expanding this awareness? In what ways can these considerations on visuality serve as subversive vehicles to re-evaluate epistemic and aesthetic principles/hierarchies? How has this been done in the arts and sciences of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries?